﻿﻿﻿Over last few years numerous data-mining competitions were organized. The famous Netflix challenge, KDD Cups, and many others attract top-level specialists to compete in building the best models. In our recently published paper titled "Medical Data Mining: Insights from Winning Two Competitions" in the journal Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (see below), we address some of the lessons learned from two major competitions we won in 2008: KDD Cup 2008 and Informs Data Mining Challenge 2008. In the paper we ...

In the lead-up to the world cup, Kaggle invited statisticians and data miners to take on the big investment banks in predicting the outcome of the World Cup. Now that the final has been decided and the vuvuzelas have finally gone quiet, we can take a look at how Kagglers stacked up against the quants at JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, UBS and Danske Bank in forecasting the World Cup. The answer? Top Kagglers won hands down. In total, 65 teams ...

Kaggle is currently hosting a bioinformatics contest, which requires participants to pick markers in a series of HIV genetic sequences that correlate with a change in viral load (a measure of the severity of infection). Within a week and a half, the best submission had already outdone the best methods in the scientific literature. This result neatly illustrates the strength of data modeling competitions. Whereas scientific literature tends to evolve slowly (somebody writes a paper, somebody else tweaks that paper ...

I'm a post-doctoral research fellow studying deep machine learning methods with Professor Yoshua Bengio at the Universitéde Montréal. I study both natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on large scale data sets. I'm a Kaggle member. From observing Kaggle and other data-driven online forums (such as get-theinfo and related blog discussion), I have seen the power of online communication in improving research and practice on data driven topics. However, I also noticed several problems in natural language ...